Tuesday, April 25, 2017

CH. 1 edits

Sheriff Dempsey Witt of Podunk County Georgia celebrated the new year by doing the same thing that he always did on a Saturday night - by getting stupid drunk and trying to kill himself. He'd come close a couple of times to actually knocking himself off, but he almost always never succeeded. Invariably, he would pass out before working up the required cojones to actually do the deed. It didn't help that Dempsey Witt was also a hopelessly happy drunk so he always became really shitty at suicide after a dozen or so shots of double rectified spirits.

However, at the current moment he couldn't have given a horses patoot about the meticulous plans he'd made the night before while he was three sheets to the wind and at the end of his rope... that is, the plans he'd made to never have to wake up with another planet sized hangover, ever again. At the moment he was safely ensconced inside the bowels of oblivion, and that was the plan. The problem was that the plan seemed to be perpetually stuck inside a gosub loop that was attached to an if/then statement of somewhat dubious logic, resulting in an infinitely repeating subroutine... like a closed, time-like loop.

Whatever, who cares. Dempsey certainly didn't. To him, it was simply another repetition of his weekly routine, which began like this...

1. Drink yourself silly on Saturday night.
2. Carefully plan your suicide.
3. Wake up Sunday morning, disappointed and with a planet sized hangover.
4. Sober up and sheriff the county until next Saturday and -
5. - keep the county in its cups.
6. Repeat.

He came to that morning buried underneath an avalanche of murky confusion and with absolutely no idea who he was, where he was, or why the silent depths of sweet oblivion had felt it necessary that he should be vomited back into existence. There was no identity, no ego, no perception, no nothing. For Dempsey Witt, the entirety of his being during those first moments of non-oblivion consisted merely of a familiar sense of resignation, accompanied by mild disappointment. No biggie... just a kind of 'all encompassing 'oh well'. Plus his head felt like it was crammed full of steel wool, which made any attempt at thinking comparable to having the inside of his noggin scrubbed vigorously with a brillo pad.

After passing out again and immediately bouncing right back to suffocating (I don't think the suffocating part was mentioned earlier, so... yeah, suffocating) underneath an avalanche of murky confusion, Dem became aware of a cold, hard surface pressing uncomfortably against his entire body. He couldn't begin to fathom what it might be, which made the inside of his brain itch like the image of a madman's head fungus. He could feel the cold, hard 'whatever it was' trying to squash his eyeball as it pushed against the side of his face, just pressing and pressing, like some kind of giant, really bad spatula.

::: squashed eyeball afterimages, memory triggered, horror buried in the subconscious, a dream no a nightmare remembered, the imminent arrival of the far flung Hunger from the Eleventeenth dimension, the STARVE-ling :::

A kong, drawn out gasping, choking, suffocating, and drowning noise, like that of a dying, pathetic creature, issued forth from his throat as a perfectly causal reaction to some insanity-spanning horror that most likely lurked just beneath his conscious memory. No doubt about it... it was definitions like some kind of fucked up Jack-in-the-box.

No likey, he thought. He said it out loud - 'No likey no likey no likey' - and then he shouted - 'ME DEFINITELY NO LIKEY!' He awoke suddenly, as if from a nightmare, and the murky confusion transmogrified into a conscious thing. 'What the heck happened, and what the heck is this crap that's happening!' he screamed inside his own head. Then he passed out.

::: Exposition :::

Consciousness came crashing into his noggin like a forty car pileup.

::: Exposition :::

Well, there was the cold, slick thing he had cradled like a teddy bear against the declivity near the top of his chest, with the long end of it pushed up snugly under his chin. 'Huh', he thought, feeling vaguely repulsed. 'What's this thing?' Although he held it like a teddy bear, it definitely wasn't comforting like a teddy bear ought to be. No, this thing was... could be... comforting, yeah. But not like teddy bear comfort... more like 'Smite Thine Enemies' comfort.

What the hell? he thought. Never mind, I don't wanna know.

he'd been more and more of a mind to do something about the problem once and for all, but he never seemed to get around to it because he keep passing out at the crucial moment.

::: Exposition on suicide and plans for suicide and screwing up his own suicide :::

What he'd gotten instead was the grandmother of all hangovers.

The inside of his mouth was dry and his lips were spit-welded. They made a moist 'pop' as they came unstuck. He tried to build up a little saliva by smacking his tongue and lips together, which made a nasty noise, like a dog snacking on its own nether regions.

'Tastes like a dogs butthole.'

He tried to inhale through his nose and was greeted with the smell of snotty, freshly snored boogers. His eyes were gummed up and crusted over.

::: yada yada yada :::

Dim was definitely disappointed. He'd chickened out again. If he was really serious about blowing his brains out, really, he was gonna have to man up and do it sober.

Ubiquitous, he thought to himself as he heaved and pulsated while trying to catch his breath. Ubiquitous. He'd learned that word some twenty years ago from some science fiction novel that he'd been reading, and at the time he'd thought it a pretty damn cool word. Ubiquitous - meaning ever present, abundant, all over the place, filling the nooks and crannies, just all over everything. The boogers in my nose are ubiquitous, he mused as he threw up all over the kitchen floor. The ubiquitous vomit covered the kitchen floor.

He thought of all the ubiquitous things in his life that he hated. The ubiquitous waking up that happened every day was the worst... then there was the ubiquitous hangover, followed by the ubiquitous passage of time. Inside of that was the ubiquitous dread, from which he observed and followed his own ubiquitous habits, every day, ubiquitously. Oh, how he hated that word. If was just so... pretentious! And ubiquitous!

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Zounds cried the astounded clown in a gown who was bound for down town as he frowned at the resounding sound of the renowned crown that he'd found as it wound up on a round mound surrounded by abounding brown ground near his half drowned hound from around the pound. Meh.